John Larsen, president emeritus of New Balance, will run the World Federation of the Sporting Goods Industry as of next week, representing the American zone as part of the statutory rotation between the Americas, Europe and Asia. He was nominated very recently for the post by SGMA International after several internal discussions..
As of late last year, one strong candidate was Lindsay Stewart, a long-time aide to Phil Knight at Nike, but he pulled back for personal and professional reasons.An active supporter of the WFSGI, Bob Corliss, was the only candidate lately, but his recent resignation as chief executive of The Athlete’s Foot left him without any corporate standing to hold the post.
Larsen worked for 23 years for Etonic and, after setting up his own consultancy, he joined New Balance as president in 1990, acting as Jim Davis’ right arm. He was named as “president emeritus” in 1996, but he continued to be active within the company, notably by taking charge of New Balance EMEA in 1999. He holds other directorships and sits on the Industry & Trade Advisory Committee of the U.S. government, with responsibility for footwear, leather products and textiles.
Larsen, who has vowed to revitalize the world organization, replaces Michel Perraudin who ran the world body over the last three years, after Masato Mizuno. A veteran of Adidas, Perraudin has set up his own consultancy, MP Consult, and he has gotten some interesting new directorships in the sporting goods sector and others. He became a director of Odlo last year, and a few months ago he also became the only outside director of Tecnica Group. Besides acting as chairman of the advisory and supervisory boards at Märklin, the big German toy company, he also sits on the advisory board of a German office furniture group.
The three world regions continue to be represented by three vice presidents: Horst Widmann of Puma for Europe; Tom Cove of SGMA International for the Americas; and Mizuno for Asia.
New on WFSGI’s board are eight persons: Alberto Bichi, secretary general of the European Federation of the Sporting Goods Industry (FESI); Frank Dassler, general attorney of Adidas; Gumercindo Moraes Neto, sporting goods director of Alpargatas Brazil; Frank Zhang of Li-Ning; Noumman Butt, president of SCCI; Hirotaka Miyaji, executive director of JASPO; O-Sung Kwon of Vivasport and KOSPA; and Manfred Wutzlhofer, chairman and chief executive of Messe München. Butt and Miyaji replace Tahir Kapur from Pakistan and Fumiya Tamiaki of Molten, respectively.
The WFSGI is expected to name a successor to its long-time secretary general in Switzerland, André Gorgemans. He is expected to move shortly to the International Olympic Committee, where he will focus on the thorny task of regulating brand identification for competing athletes. The former Adidas executive had to deal with this issue from the WFSGI in recent years, where the Three Stripes sought to preserve their privileges against the likes of the Swoosh.
